Synergy
by Shylee Taregan
Summary: [d r a b b l e . f i c] Hermione has been inducted into the Death Eaters as per Dumbledore’s final plan to infiltrate the enemy and destroy it from the inside out. [SSHG AU]
1. Beginning: Descende

**Synergy**

ooo

An AU Grape (Granger/Snape) Drabble-fic based on a variation of the 100-drabble prompt of the LJ community **100Quills**. I hope you enjoy. And, yeah, I know I'm supposed to be writing **100 Things** and **Medians**. I'm just adding one more fic to the list.

ooo

**Beginning: **_**Descende**_

**001. Broken**

_He chases the sun_

Hermione has seen many faces in her eighteen years of living. She has seen hope, she has seen rage, she has seen joy, she has seen grief. But when a powerful wizard, the Headmaster of Hogwarts, the Order of Merlin, the odd old man, approaches her, his face is not quite like any she has ever seen before.

He brings with him a request that would shatter a lesser woman. But, she supposes, that is exactly why he chooses her.

**002. Desire**

_Always be mine_

As she traverses the grounds of their last safe haven, she catches the glances between Ginny and Harry, sees the smiles that Lavender and Ron share. She bears witness to the intimacies of friendship and excesses of love, and she finds that it is that much harder to disappear without them.

"It's not going to be easy," she tells him later that night, her fear rampant.

"Only the foolish believe otherwise," he replies, his expectation tangible.

**003. Fog**

_Scream your heart out_

She tries to come to terms with what it is he asks of her. She tries to believe that it would be worth it, that she is strong enough to endure it, that she is intelligent enough. But no matter how hard she tries, she cannot force herself to believe it.

In the end, she says yes anyway.

**004. Attention**

_Intricacies like a grain of sand_

She stands quite still, taking her last deep breaths. Behind her stands only her old Headmaster. Beside her stands her Potions professor, seven years' courtesy etched in the three feet that lie between them. She nods to no one, and they disapparate.

Are you frightened? he asks in her mind as the grounds of the school disappear behind them.

She replies, Aren't you?

I've done this before, he tells her as they reappear in the graveyard.

**005. Eyes**

_Moments which pass_

In the moments between their departure and their arrival, she catches his gaze and does not let go, even when he turns away to call the others.

**006. Thrive**

_Disconsolate children_

She turns to him, her once bright eyes now dark, her hair smoothed back, her skin pale. He glances at her, a dark shadow who still cannot fully understand the reasons behind this. The knowledge that she does not, either, furrows his brow as the first pop of a Death eater signals their entry.

**007. Sound**

_Reverberations through time_

Pompous rich followers, she thinks as they appear around her. Always making so much noise.

The first one turns to the man beside her. "A mudblood?"

She sees his nose flare. "The Dark Lord requests her."

She cannot see the other man's sneer through his mask, but she knows that it is there.

"Indeed," he murmurs.

**008. Ends**

_Circles refract and bend in two_

Hermione thinks that her childhood ended the day she became friends with the Boy Who Lived.

Severus knows that his childhood ended the day he was born.

Neither of them know that the other suspects the same.

"Is it so hard to believe?" she asks him later, much later.

"On the contrary," he says quietly, "it's easier to believe than your presence here."

**009. Home**

_Let's go there_

She dreams of them; of her mother's laughter and her father's smile. She has her father's hands and her mother's hair and their love and their joy. She takes it with her and stores it in a place that no darkness will ever be able to reach.

"What was yours like?" she asks him.

"Dark," he says abruptly, and she knows he is lying. "Don't ask inane questions."

She watches him, knowing. "Do you ever miss it?" She asks because she doesn't know like he thinks she knows.

He watches her for a time, then looks away. "No."

**010. Jealousy**

_Take these things and make them mine_

He remembers another girl, like her but not quite. She has the same kind of intelligence and cleverness, the same kind of face, though their eyes and hair are much different. But both of them are muggle-borns, and it is this that likens them so in his eyes.

Though she infrequently asks, and he rarely ever answers, she likes to hear about the woman. She compares herself to a female who once captured the heart of a man whose respect was so hard to earn.

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**Author's Notes. **Your thoughts, whether they be screams of rage and warnings to go die, or lovely little comments on a semi-good story, are much appreciated. D 


	2. Beginning: Stand

**Beginning: _Stand_ **

**011. Dance**

_This is the last rhapsody_

The words they share are intricately phrased, always gauging, always a measurement, each step weighed in significance with the other.

Hermione cannot fathom how she will be able to mimic his fine movements, but her ponderings are cut short when the creature beckons her forward and she is forced to kneel before him.

**012. Despair**

_May I ring true, as I tremble_

She relies on her proficiency as an Occlumens to hide her thoughts from him. She relies on the knowledge that her world relies on _her_; that she is working towards the destruction of this loathsome disgrace of nature; that she is not alone in her endeavor.

She relies on the strength her professor's presence gives her, but finds that everything she relies on cannot quell her fear.

**013. Secret**

_Becoming who we are_

She remembers the day after she turned seventeen when Albus Dumbledore asked her to become what Severus Snape already was. It took her an entire year to prepare – to master Occlumency, to train her in Defense and Potions and Transfiguration and Charms, to say her goodbyes. She was sworn, by way of an Unbreakable Vow, to the way of the light.

She still remembers the look in his eyes when she turned to him, suddenly an equal, an outcast, a spy.

**014. Disheveled**

_Rumpled sheets and messy hurts_

She wakes the next morning, briefly unable to remember where she is. Then she glances toward the closed door and blinks. The previous day rushes back to her.

"We will stay here until you are inducted," he had told her as he locked the door of the cabin and warded it against intruders.

"You'll stay with me?"

He looked at her with an expression she cannot explain. "Would you prefer if I didn't?"

**015. History**

_Life waits to begin_

He does not see it as she does. History, to her, is a blessing; history defines who you are because it tells who you have been. History, to him, is the course of things; one event defines another and, if you look closely, you see a pattern amongst the tales.

"Do you dislike your past so much?" she yells at him, infuriated that, again, he eludes her questioning.

"_Yes_!" he roars, though it is not so much the volume as the pain in his face in the second before he turns away that finally tells her to stop asking.

**016. Sweet**

_When I see your smile_

Her parents denied her right to a childhood, she tells him jokingly the next day. "Never anything bad for me to eat."

He, however, cannot imagine why a parent would be considered bad for not allowing her child to have a chocolate once in a while.

"It's the principle of the thing," she says dismissively.

"I don't think you understand," he replies quietly, "the magnitude of your parents' love for you."

And she is silenced, just as she always is.

**017. Deafening**

_Black clouds on a graceless sky_

He describes the Calling as falling, almost. Except instead of being safely caught in a net at the bottom, you fall among spiky thorns and rotted corpses.

She stares at him. "You certainly have an aptitude for angst," she says, only half meaning it.

He does not believe her. "You have trained for this for a year, and you still do not realize the enormity of the job to which you have been entrusted," he snarls.

She, however, merely watches him. "I think I have more of a grasp of what is expected of me than you do."

**018. Exhaustion**

_Mistakes worth making_

The night before she is to stand before a vast assemblage and join the ranks of the most feared criminals known to the wizarding world, she tosses and turns, too hot and too cold, unable to close her eyes to the darkness of her room, afraid to open them to the truth that she is about to sign her soul away.

In the few hours before dawn, she sneaks into his room and sits at the foot of his bed, and is comforted by the fact that he has not been able to sleep either.

**019. Fluid**

_Showing self undisguised_

She showers, dresses, and enters the living room wearing the midnight robe over nothing, a fact she finds uncomfortable but cannot avoid. She sees him wearing his high-collared robes of infinite black, and remembers once likening him to a great black bat. When he leaves, a signal for her to follow, however, she thinks he is more like a quiet river that slides smoothly along its banks. Though impassive and disarmingly calm, it hides a war of disquiet within its depths.

**020. Surrender**

_Look back and wonder_

She kneels before him again, forcing herself to remain faceless. She is a daughter of muggles, but a genius among wizards, the best witch in all her years at Hogwarts. She is a descendant of magic, a follower of the light. On the eve of what would be her first year outside of school, she pledges her life and soul to the one being she has sworn since age eleven to destroy.

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**Author's Notes.** Reviews? Anyone? Please??? 


	3. Amid: Inconsolable

**Amid: **_**Inconsolable**_

**021. Rage**

_A deepening alarm_

He watches the insolent little mudblood with a haughty expression, the idea of initiating her into their ranks like acid on his forked tongue. He knows that she is intelligent, knows that she is clever, knows that she may bring something to his army that the blathering fool Dumbledore does not have. But he is not the world's most feared sorcerer for nothing; he gauges the chances that she might be a spy.

**022. Heartless**

_Nonexistence is most kind_

"Crucio!" the voice rasps and pain tears through her body, an unimaginably wicked feeling she can liken to broken glass grating against her skin, salt in her eyes, steel in her muscles, needles in her blood, bile in her throat. The pain is not physical, but the magic torments her mentally until she feels it on her skin, thinks she is bleeding her life's blood but she sees nothing, knows nothing, until at last it stops.

**023. Silk**

_Neutral and enigmatic_

The night washes over her in the silence that follows her screaming. She pants hard, her limbs twitching from the prolonged curse. But she remembers her training, and her duty, and rises again to her knees, her head bowed in obeisance.

She knows that he approves, however suspicious of her he may be.

"Do you vow to honor the Darkness as I deem it, with I as your master?"

"I do," she says, her voice like ripped silk.

**024. Box**

_Let go of all you know_

The rest of the meeting passes in much the same way, and Hermione learns a valuable lesson in self-preservation: it is better to think as they do.

**025. Stable**

_A place to go when you live like they do_

She feels rather than knows, with a numbing quality, that it is coming to an end. Her initiation with nine others is followed by revels that appall her sensibilities, but she forces herself to watch. She must learn more about the people of whom she is now supposed to be one.

**026. Independence**

_See if you can keep up_

She stands aside, not conspicuously but still not joining in, her brown eyes stolid and watchful. On the other side of the crowd, he observes her with almost indecent interest. She handles the revelry with more maturity and impassiveness than most of her age and temperament. But he supposes that is why she was chosen.

He is shocked when her sharp gaze snaps to his, and shocked more when she glares and turns away.

**027. Melody**

_Waltz of the forgotten_

For murderers they dance with elegance and dignity, but these are, after all, the most ancient and noble pureblood houses represented in all their glory. She listens to more than the music that plays from the fire, and sees more than their graceful waltz into oblivion as the night wears on, and she cannot imagine herself among them.

**028. Fire**

_Kisses a venomous goodbye_

The flames die low and the ten inductees bow before their Lord. He appoints to each of them a guide who is made responsible for the novices' shortcomings. Severus Snape stands before her and she is forced, again, to sign her life away. She binds herself to the man in a way that ancient magic guards against, and as she is led away, she feels her soul shiver at its own darkness.

**029. Years**

_It starts with one thing_

As they apparate and reappear at the cabin to pack and then leave, she thinks about her Potions master (though he is no longer), Dumbledore's spy (though she is now one too), her cynical teacher (though cynicism is a blessing), and wonders how strong of heart he must be to have endured what she has in this one night for more than half of his lifetime.

**030. Bonds**

_Something's getting in the way_

And though she flies through the air as free as any bird, she feels that she flies with manacled hands, the mark on her left forearm a stark reminder of just what freedom costs.

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**Author's Note. **Please review! 


	4. Amid: Killing Loneliness

**Amid: **_**Killing Loneliness**_

**Author's Note.** Some of the drabbles are a bit longer, but that is due to a review I received about now having enough information. Drabbles aren't meant to have too many details, which is why I love the challenge, but I hope that some of these help clear up what's going on.

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**031. Fever**

_Phase one of any sickness_

Her face was flushed, her skin was clammy, her eyes were too bright, and her throat was sore. But she was not sick, and she knew that he knew.

**032. View**

_Perspective matters more_

She looks across the great lake toward what used to be her home. The glimmering torchlights paint the castle with a homey air in spite of its forbidding turrets and steeples and towers. The vision is marred as tears escape her eyes and she turns to the man beside her. He, however, is not looking at the castle.

"You don't miss it," she says inaudibly, but he catches it.

"We must go, Granger," he says, his voice strained. He is staring into the woods, his right arm clutching his left. She blinks away the tears.

"Will you ever miss it?" she asks one more time, because she needs to hear his answer.

His silence and disapparation answers her.

**033. Snow**

_It could still be felt_

The next morning when she awakens, he is not there. She glances around, momentarily confused until she remembers why she is here, at Spinner's End: she is allowed nowhere near Hogwarts until she has proven her loyalty to the Dark Lord, and Snape is her "guardian" until she does.

She glances out the window, but sees a faint covering of powder-white on the glass. Tiptoeing over to it, her blanket around her, she stares down into the backyard.

Severus Snape is a scar of black blood on a silken white sheet, and as he bows his head, Hermione remembers that November is the month Snape's mother died.

She had not known today was that anniversary.

**034. Old**

_Tears paint silver trails_

Alone, she examines the room he has given her. There is nothing of interest but the closet, which is filled with dusty boxes. She reaches into the nearest unopened one and pulls out an old muggle photograph.

The man staring at her bears such a resemblance to the man in the yard that she, for a moment, mistakes them for being one and the same. But then she realizes that this man's nose is shorter, his chin narrower, his forehead wider. He is not smiling and the glass over his picture is cracked.

Quietly she replaces the photograph and backs away.

**035. Waste**

_An unmarked grave_

There is something to be learned when one is engaged in a war. One must learn to steel one's senses and give more than just his body to the cause. A soldier is one who stands before the helpless and against the rage of darkness. A soldier is one who has sold his heart, soul, mind, and body away, regardless of what side he is on. A soldier is one who must take into consideration the fact that he will die, and someone he knows will die, and someone he loves will die.

The lesson, Snape thinks, is that war does not determine who is right. It determines who is left behind.

**036. Pretty**

_Dream within reality_

She brushes her hair with no real conviction; her wild curls are a long, untamable mane that falls around her face. She stares at herself in the mirror of the small, dim bathroom, imagining herself looking the way she had felt in her fourth year. But the memory does not come as easily, and she looks away, disgusted.

**037. Mystery**

_Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark_

He does not understand.

He cannot fathom why the old man would put a girl of eighteen in the most dangerous position she could hold, a position he shared. He cannot see what the pressing need for two spies is, and Dumbledore refuses answer. He does not think that Dumbledore fully comprehends what he is doing, sending a mudblood into the lair of the beast. He does not know what the old wizard knows, and this irritates, enrages, disgusts, and shames him.

Because he does not understand.

**038. Hush**

_Signs that were missed_

He finds her with her face buried in her arms, her small frame shuddering with the force of her sobs and the glacial winter winds. More concerned with the fact that she is standing outside with nothing but her nightgown, he wraps his arm around her and all but drags her inside.

"I'm sorry, Professor," she says automatically when they are safely inside the warmth of his kitchen. He glowers at her, his rage evident.

"Tell me, Miss Granger," he says slowly, each word revealing more and more of his anger. "Are you planning on killing yourself before the Dark Lord does?"

Her eyes widen with more tears. "Forgive me," she says quietly. "I forget my place."

"Hush," he snaps, unclasping his robe and draping it around her shoulders.

**039. Reminisce**

_Your silence is your proof_

She was remembering again, and she wanted to forget. The memory of the pain haunts her still, and she grips her left forearm. Though she knows that this is not the actual mark, it leaves its stain all the same. For she is not a Death Eater just yet. The war has reached something of a stalemate, Dumbledore unable to fathom Voldemort's next move, and Voldemort unwilling to tell. With this, Voldemort grows careless with his followers. He requires them to be trained, as she is.

She turns to find him watching her. "Sir?"

"In a war," he says in a soft tone, "there are no unwounded soldiers."

And they both understand.

**040. Nothing**

_Empty like the sea is full_

In the day she sits specter-like in the sitting room, reading page after page after page. In the night she lays in bed, her terror following her in sleep and pervading her dreams. In the morning she awakes, and her eyes are vacant with her silent screams.

For though there was never anything to be seen in her dreams, she remembers.

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**Author's Note. **Regardless of how little attention these drabbles get, I'm quite proud of my work. xD Feedback is rewarded with cookies. 


	5. Intermission: Small Wonders

**Intermission: **_**Small Wonders**_

**Author's Note.** Yeah, so school's it's usual pain in the neck, plus I've FINALLY got stuff up for **Medians** and **100 Things**, which is a relief for me. I didn't want to abandon all of my work over school. I mean, yes, school's important, but I love writing, and I need the practice anyway.

But enough of my rambling. Enjoy, if you please.

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**041. Questions**

_If it's me you need to turn to_

She studies him over breakfast, during lunch, from her vantage in his sitting room. She wants to know about his family – did he ever have anyone who loved him, at all? She wants to know about his aspirations before his work became his life. She wonders about his thoughts and daydreams, if he had ever had those before. She considers how a luminescent pearl emerges from the darkness after years spent quietly building up from a minuscule grain of sand, and thinks how honor is a goal to be sought.

**042. Friendship**

_when you feel that you can't go on_

She sets the plate of eggs and bacon in front of him. "I thought you might like breakfast."

**043. Disguise**

_there's nowhere in town to go_

He sits on the right hand side of the most evil wizard in centuries, levels his cynical chagrin, represses his instinctual hatred, and raises his fist in honor.

**044. Window**

_what would you think of me now?_

Hermione Granger does not believe eyes are windows to the soul, for windows can be guarded with draperies of stolid frigidity.

**045. Fade**

_cut my eyes on visions of you_

She closes her eyes against the coolness of October, but it does little to still the images of Ron's red hair and Harry's green eyes, their expressions frozen in the distant coolness from the last time she had ever seen them. She imagines her life as their friend, but not their best friend, and she almost wishes for these images to disappear and plague her no longer.

**046. Wish**

_damage done by a lost loved one_

He glares into the night sky, the repugnant, unfathomable girl beside him, and is forced to blink when she gasps at a shooting star.

"Make a wish," she murmurs, as if from habit. She does not notice him as she closes her eyes, lips moving in a wordless plea.

He does not believe in wishes, but he looks into the sky and imagines that, had he the ability to travel back into the past, he would have been able to save her in time.

**047. Kismet**

_live like you're dying_

His forearm burns and his fists clench, and she notices that it is different this time.

He looks at her and rises. "It is time." She rises, too.

"I've passed?" she whispers as they hurry beyond the apparation boundaries.

He glances at her. "Not yet."

**048. Tender**

_Across distances, across time_

In his pocket is a crumpled, ripped scrap of paper, upon which is written, "_All my love, Lily._"

He closes his hand around this before they disappear.

**049. Vigil**

_breathe life into me_

The masked Death Eater grabs her as she appears and hauls her toward the middle of the circle with the other initiates. She holds her head high, does not tremble, and stares into Severus Snape's eyes, taking courage from their mutual insurgence.

Severus Snape stares back and imagines that, if any hope is left, this will stop now.

**050. Torches**

_close your eyes while everything burns_

The silver-handed Pettigrew walks toward the defiant initiates, one hand raised to present the Dark Lord. The snake-like face appears demonic in the dancing flames as he raises his wand. The Death Eaters follow, and, as one, their eyes find an initiate.

Riddle's falls upon the Mudblood as they cry together, "_Crucio!"_

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**Author's Note. **Read and review please! 


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